Padres Jagoff posted a piece about it on Gwynntelligence Wednesday morning, in which he compared the Padres 2017 giveaways and promotions with the ones from the Dodgers, Cubs, Indians, Red Sox, and Giants. To say he was underwhelmed would be an understatement.

Promotions and giveaways are supposed to be an incentive to get you out to the ballpark when you wouldn’t necessarily have gone. If you get something of perceived value – on top of the basic product – the product becomes more valuable. It’s not even Economics 101, it’s high school Intro to Economics, that one class that they only made me take for a single semester in my senior year.

The Padres are not good. The expectation is that they’re going to lose a lot of games this year. Now, they won’t necessarily tell us that straight up, but it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to do the math. So, why would their promotional schedule be so underwhelming? I would think they would like to get people in the ballpark on Saturdays, however these promotions probably wouldn’t inspire anyone on the fence to get to Petco Park this season.

The Padres are a mess. Not all of the problem is perceptual, but part of it is. Padres Trail mentioned “the allure of expectation” in his discussion of GM Josh Byrnes’ recent firing, and it’s a concern.

If false hope cost Byrnes his job–and with the current ownership group, who knows what the real motivation was–then maybe a key going forward is to set more realistic expectations and communicate those to the buying public via the mystical, magical discipline of marketing.

I thought about this for, oh, a good five minutes and came up with a few suggestions. By the time you finish reading, it will be obvious why I never went into marketing. Honesty may be a good policy, but there are some places it just doesn’t belong.

Retro weekend. Three out of four games against the Chicago Cubs honoring the 1984 National League Championship team. And brown. Lots of brown.

You might think this would be a perfect time to announce that the Padres were working on new uniforms that somehow incorporate brown into the color scheme. I mean, they’re honoring their past, right? They wore the brown 1984 road jerseys two nights in a row, at home. And gave away 40,000+ brown replica jerseys to fans on Saturday. Brown is arguably the most identifiable color used by a Major League team. Ever!

Wow. It has been quite a while since I’ve had a non-Padres and Pints post here. June 28th to be exact. Welp, let’s see how this goes.

Yesterday morning the Padres sent out their annual survey. It appears to be almost exactly the same questions as last year, when I live tweeted my results on the tweetbox. I don’t feel like digging my old answers up, but if you want to read the questions without taking the survey jbox of Gaslamp Ball did a live blog of his results.

These surveys are supposedly used to gauge fan interest in a variety of things. From uniforms to logos to….what type of car would the Padres be if they were a car? Some questions are usually worded in a specific way to steer the survey takers one direction or another thus resulting in favorable results from the team’s point of view. Others give the fans open range to input what they choose. Of course the survey really doesn’t mean too much to us outsiders, as we’ll never know the true results. Some skeptics even claim it’s possible that there technically are no results and the survey is just a front to make the fans think that the organization cares about our opinions. I’m not one of those skeptics, but that idea has been brought up in the past regarding surveys like this.

You can focus group and survey all you want but there are a few key things, from a marketing aspect (not on-field), that the Padres need to do to win over a good portion of the people in San Diego. And I’m not talking about the die hard bloggers or blog readers who go to games regardless of the product on the field. I’m talking about the majority of the San Diego population who goes to 1 or 2 games a year. Petco Park has now been around for 10 seasons (I’ll let that sink in) and the shine has worn off. The Padres are at a stage where they must now make some serious changes to the way they are running things.